Lost in the ‘death realm’ of El Salvador’s prisons
- The San Juan Daily Star
- May 9
- 6 min read
By Annie Correal
José Alfredo Vega’s parents said they were able to identify his body only because of a childhood scar. Otherwise, the corpse was swollen beyond recognition.
“He was OK when he left,” said his father, Miguel Ángel Vega, recalling the night nearly three years ago when police officers barged into the family’s home and took away his son. “He was healthy.”
Now, at 29, José Alfredo was dead in a morgue.
President Donald Trump’s decision to send to El Salvador hundreds of people he says are gang members has ignited outrage and approval in the United States. But most Salvadorans have barely registered their arrival and absorption into the country’s opaque penal system.
Here in El Salvador, where tens of thousands of men have been swept up in mass arrests in recent years, the disappearance of men into prisons not to be heard from again is disturbingly familiar.
Since 2022, when President Nayib Bukele’s government imposed a state of emergency to quell rampant gang violence, around 80,000 people have been incarcerated, more than tripling El Salvador’s inmate population. Thousands of innocent people have been locked up with no legal recourse and no communication with their families, according to their relatives, former prisoners and rights groups.
Hundreds of deaths have been documented inside El Salvador’s prisons, with families also reporting torture and maiming. Still, Bukele and his security strategy remain incredibly popular. Polls consistently show that more than 80% of Salvadorans approve of the young leader, saying under his administration they regained a precious luxury: the ability to safely walk down their streets.
“Bukele is doing everything right, we are all delighted,” said Daniel Francisco de León, a San Salvador resident. “It’s a whole different mood here. They used to just rob, rob, rob.”
Families of the imprisoned say that only they know what lies behind Bukele’s security strategy and its seeming success.
“I would not tell a single country to do what they did here,” said Vega, who identified his son’s body last month.
When Vega responded to the call from the morgue — it was the first he’d heard of his son since his arrest in May 2022 — the bodies of four other prisoners lay nearby. His son, he was told, had died of sepsis.
The Salvadoran human rights group Cristosal has documented 378 prison deaths since 2022, though Cristosal’s director, Noah Bullock, says the true number is likely much higher. The deaths, Bullock said, are the result of an “intentional denial of access to basic necessities like food, water, health care, hygiene,” in some cases combined with physical abuse.
Andrés Guzmán Caballero, the government’s human rights commissioner, rejected claims that prisoners were dying from intentional neglect or abuse, or at a higher rate than the civilian population, including from the effects of malnutrition.
“That’s completely false,” he said in an interview.
Guzmán Caballero could not provide an exact number of prisoner deaths but said that there is “very low” mortality in the country’s two dozen penitentiaries.
American lawyers for the migrants sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration and several members of the U.S. Congress have pressed officials for information on the men. The lawyers and family members say they have not heard from them since they were expelled in mid-March.
The American and Salvadoran governments have refused to offer updates on their health or the conditions under which they are being held, other than to report that the most high profile of the men, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is in good health.
In the country’s capital, San Salvador, street lamps adorned with the Salvadoran flag light up as the sun sets. People can now stay outdoors at night.
“I like to say that we actually liberated millions,” Bukele told Trump last month.
Many Salvadorans say they agree. They can now go out when they please, play soccer, walk dogs. They are no longer shaken down by teenage gang members, asked to turn over food or property, or their daughters. Emergency rooms that once overflowed with gang victims are calm.
“You were like a little stray animal: there one day and gone the next,” said Teresa Lemus, a street vendor. “Now we’re 100% safe. I can carry my cash in my bag.”
Lemus’ brother was among those imprisoned for more than a year amid the crackdown despite his disability, a spinal condition that left him reliant on leg braces.
“Sooner or later, he’ll be proved innocent,” she recalled telling people.
She was right. But the letter exonerating her brother came too late, after he died this year in a prison called El Penalito, at 48. When she saw him in the morgue, he was emaciated. The explanation for his death, she said, was vague — depression, anemia.
Still, Lemus does not blame Bukele.
“I’m very clear that the president hasn’t done me wrong in any way,” she said. “Just as he has hurt us in some ways, he has helped us in others.”
Her brother, she is sure, would have said the same.
While polls show Bukele remains popular, some say the high numbers are a sign that people do not feel they can voice what is in fact growing public concern over the state of emergency — known here as “El Regimen.”
“You have a population that says, ‘Sure, we support the president, but I would be afraid to tell you if I didn’t,’ ” Bullock said.
Those who have spoken out include the parents of the disappeared, who march through the capital carrying posters with their children’s photos. Among them are Vega and his wife, Marta González, who just buried their youngest son. They have another son still in prison.
Nearly two decades ago, as the threat of gangs grew, they moved to a remote coastal village to keep their sons safe, Vega said. He worked at a shrimp cooperative, fished and did odd jobs. His sons eventually joined him.
On weekends, he said, they played soccer with a rural police force sent by the government to keep the gangs away.
Then a new president took power. And new police officers.
José Alberto was arrested, and the following morning as he was hauling in shrimp, his brother, Vidal Adalberto, was also taken into custody.
Since the young men’s arrests, their family has sold everything to afford the packages of food and supplies that are the only things people are permitted to deliver to prisoners.
Of those imprisoned under the state of emergency, only 8,000 people have been released, according to the government.
One former prisoner, who asked that his name be withheld because he feared rearrest, said he would never forget his year in two prisons, from 2022-23.
“It’s a death realm,” he said. “The realm of the devil.”
His first stop was Izalco, a maximum-security prison on the outskirts of the capital.
On arrival, the men were stripped to their underwear and forced to walk between rows of guards who hit them with clubs, he said. They were crammed three to a bunk, forced to split meager rations like watery beans or instant pasta. The man said he lost 30 pounds in a month.
Ultimately, he said, he was placed with a group of “civilians without tattoos,” people considered “collaborators, in theory.”
Then he was sent to a less restrictive prison facility north of San Salvador, known as Mariona. There, detainees could leave their cells, kick a ball and play dominoes.
But beyond routine checks, including weigh-ins, there was no medical care, the man said. Many prisoners suffered from “a kind of diarrhea I didn’t know was possible,” he said.
Prisoners’ families sent packages, but guards removed things like oatmeal, cornflakes and cookies, the former inmate said, setting aside calorie-rich food for starving inmates.
Guzmán, the human rights commissioner, denied this.
“Everyone receives food and everyone is fine,” he said. “When it comes to malnutrition, there is no problem. It’s not a five-star hotel but everybody eats two, three times a day and they eat well.”
On a recent morning, outside a prison in the inland city of Santa Ana, a man sitting in the back of a van held up his cuffed hands as the vehicle idled. He gestured toward his mouth, then held up his fingers to indicate how many days it had been since he had eaten: four.
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